


fill my tomb with dawn

by coastalredwoods



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, PTSD, gratuitous Spanish poetry, the Bucharest fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 20:59:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10772328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coastalredwoods/pseuds/coastalredwoods
Summary: Returning to life isn’t as easy as some of the stories make it sound. The man who used to be Bucky Barnes does his best.





	fill my tomb with dawn

**Author's Note:**

> For the friend who wanted the Bucharest scene from Bucky's perspective.

Memory is something the man keeps a close eye on these days. He writes down his movements with the same annoyed exactitude that he once expended on mission reports.

 

_March 1, 2015. Helsinki._

 

_5:04 am. Woke up. Brushed teeth. Ate breakfast (apple, two boiled eggs)._

 

_5:30 am. Went outside. Quiet. Walked around the building a couple times. Seen: a jogger, a woman talking on her cellphone, two girls holding hands._

 

_6:00 am. Returned to rented quarters–_

 

And so on and so on, filling up notebooks with his untidy scrawl. Sometimes halfway through the Latin alphabet slides into Cyrillic, and he swears at himself and starts over. He can’t tell if that’s the programming trying to course correct (like a broken machine, he doesn’t think), or if it’s just muscle memory.

 

_Please, God,_ he prays, in churches and synagogues and roadside shrines. _Let it be my stupid fuckin’ hands and their stupid fuckin’ habits. I can’t–_

 

He has trouble with that word. _Can’t_ what? Kill his friends? Shoot them? Betray every ideal they ever stood for? Turns out, he sure as hell _can_ do all of that if someone fries his brain enough times. _Can’t_ is a flimsy word for people who don’t know any better, but he uses it all the same.

 

_I can’t go back there_. 

 

_I can’t._

 

_I can’t_.

 

His memories before about six months ago are like those Ladas people drove in the Soviet Union; interesting to look at, sort of rusty around the edges, and extremely fucking unreliable. He remembers a cold blue sky over Copenhagen; his father quoting the Book of Ruth at his mother while she laughs and swats him with a dish towel; reading Federico García Lorca in a Madrid library, his fingers skating over dog-eared pages and crazy songs to Lazarus; eating chestnuts under an iron sky, burning their fingers and teasing each other about this girl and that; blood on the floor of a delicatessen. But these could all be lies, like Pierce and Zola and the Great True Thing that he was supposed to be killing for. They could have cooked them up in a lab and shoved them into his head along with the languages and the advanced murder techniques and he’d never be the wiser.

 

So he writes.

 

He’s in Bucharest when he reads about the assassination in the papers. Feels himself slip back into soldier mode again, sure and cold as drowning. He has to find his journals. He has to _know_ –

 

But there’s someone in his rooms when he gets there. In spite of everything, the man’s first instinct is to be annoyed. This dumb punk and his dumb broad shoulders and the dumb way he barges into dangerous situations on the chance that a friend might be in danger–

 

Oh, shit. He’s turning around. The man doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t talk at all, just waits.

 

Steve looks at him like he’s some kind of miracle. _My God, I am Lazarus…_ The man can’t remember how the rest of the poem goes. Never that good in English class, anyway–Miss Goode called him “unimaginative” and “slow” when she thought he couldn’t hear.

 

Steve is still staring at him. The man wants to flick his nose, muss his hair, _something_. Always too serious, that kid. Big eyes in a sad face, like Our Lady of Kazan or old Mrs. Kowalski who lived two doors down and brought them pierogis every Christmas.

 

“Do you know me?” he asks at last.

 

_God_ yes, the man wants to say. _Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God._ I’ll follow you to Siberia or Tehran or fuckin’ Coney Island if you ask me. Just ask me.

 

But he’s so tired. He’s been fighting other people’s battles since he was nine years old and angry that the neighborhood bully was picking on the Rogers kid. He’s got all the scars to prove it. He speaks Romanian and Russian and Italian and Sinhalese like it’s his birthright and he can kill a man nine different ways with a paperclip and he is _tired_.

 

“You’re Steve,” he says. “I read about you in a museum.”

 

_They’re securing the perimeter,_ someone says over the radio. The Falcon, sounding worried, which makes him saner than his stupid reckless _durak_ of a friend. Steve still hasn’t looked away from the man’s face.

 

“I know you’re nervous, and you have plenty of reason to be,” he says. “But you’re lying.”

 

“I wasn’t in Vienna,” the man says, more to himself than anyone else. “I don’t do that anymore.”

 

Oh, but he was close, close enough to go by train–can he be sure that the last few days are real? Can he really know that, when the whole engine of war lives in his head?

 

_They’re entering the building._

 

“Well, the people who think you did are coming here now. They’re not planning on taking you alive.”

 

“That’s smart. Good strategy,” the man says through the freezing haze of horror and grief. Because of course it’s come to this. It was always going to come to this.

 

_They’re on the roof. I’m compromised._

 

“This doesn’t have to end in a fight, Buck,” Steve pleads, as if just saying the words will make them true.

 

The man sighs. “It always ends in a fight.”

 

_Five seconds._

 

Pounding on the door. _What’sa matter with you,_ the man wants to shout, _your ma never teach you to knock?_

 

His sense of humor’s picked a hell of a time to grow back.

 

“You pulled me from the river,” Steve says, apparently considering death-by-strike-team less important than hashing out their relationship. “Why?”

 

The man pulls the glove off of his metal hand and flexes the fingers. Unfortunately, they’re all in perfect working order. He sighs. “I don’t know.”

 

_Three seconds._

 

“Yes, you do,” Steve says, soft and fond and not fooled at all.

 

_Breach! Breach! Breach!_

 

The window shatters inward. In the half-second before he springs into action, the man spares a thought for his journals. It’s too bad, really. He was starting to sound like a human being again and everything.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Durak - Russian for “idiot.”
> 
> Title is from the poem “Abandoned” by Federico García Lorca, which Bucky quotes at one point. I have no excuse for using this reference, aside from the fact that García Lorca writes a lot about agony and authoritarianism.


End file.
